Database reverse engineering consists of recovering the abstract descriptions of files and databases of legacy information systems. A legacy information system can be defined as a “data-intensive application, such as [a] business system based on hundreds or thousands of data files (or tables), that significantly resists modifications and changes” (Brodie & Stonebraker, 1995). The objective of d...

The Prefix table of a string reports for each position the maximal length of its prefixes starting here. The Prefix table and its dual Suffix table are basic tools used in the design of the most efficient string-matching and pattern extraction algorithms. These tables can be computed in linear time independently of the alphabet size. We give an algorithmic characterisation of a Prefix table (it...

As a software system evolves, new features are added and obsolete are removed, the design artifacts gradually diverge from its original design. Many approaches for design recovery or reverse engineering has been suggested, most with some type of support tool. Since a project's time constraints may prohibit use of sophisticated techniques and/or tools due to the learning curves associated with t...

Many software languages (and programming languages, in particular) are described simultaneously by multiple grammars that are found in different software artifacts. For instance, one grammar may reside in a language specification; another grammar may be encoded in a parser specification; yet another grammar may be present in an XML schema for toolindependent data exchange. Ideally, one would wa...

The very first step for analyzing the security of an embedded device, without prior knowledge of the device’s construction, is analyzing the printed circuit board (PCB) of the device, in order to understand its electrical implementation. This analysis is called PCB reverse engineering and its results are a list of components, technical documentation related to those components, and a schematic ...

This paper presents lessons learned from an experiment to reverse engineer a program. A reverse engineering process was used as part of a project to develop an Ada implementation of a Fortran program and upgrade the existing documentation. To accomplish this, design information was extracted from the Fortran source code and entered into a software development environment. The extracted design i...

Reverse engineering the brain will require a deep understanding of how information is represented and how computation is performed in the brain. What are the functional operations? What are the knowledge data structures? How are messages encoded? How are relationships established and broken? How are images processed? How does the brain transform signals into symbols? How does the brain generate...

Nowadays a large majority of software systems are built using various technologies that in turn rely on different languages (e.g. Java, XML, SQL etc.). We call such systems heterogeneous applications (HAs). By contrast, we call software systems that are written in one language homogeneous applications. In HAs the information regarding the structure and the behaviour of the system is spread acro...

Whereas a design pattern describes and discusses a solution to a design problem, a reverse engineering pattern describes how to understand aspects of an object-oriented design and how to identify problems in that design. In the context of a project developing a methodology for reengineering objectoriented legacy systems into frameworks, we are working on a pattern language for reengineering. Th...

Binary tools such as disassemblers, just-in-time compilers, and executable code rewriters need to have an explicit representation of how machine instructions are encoded. Unfortunately, writing encodings for an entire instruction set by hand is both tedious and error-prone. We describe derive, a tool that extracts bit-level instruction encoding information from assemblers. The user provides der...